Come Home, America—and Republicans

The country needs not a sequester but a strategic realignment.

In that year of happy memory, 1972, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, declared he would chop defense by fully one-third.

A friendly congressman was persuaded to ask Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to expatiate on what this might mean.

The Pentagon replied the Sixth Fleet might have to be pulled out of the Med, leaving Israel without U.S. protection against the fleet of Adm. Sergei Gorshkov, and provided the congressman a list of U.S. bases that would have to be shut down.

Radio ads were run in the towns closest to the bases on the Pentagon list, declaring they would be closed and all jobs terminated, should McGovern win.

Something akin to this is going on with the impending sequester.

A cut of 7 percent, $46 billion, in Pentagon spending, says Army chief Ray Odierno, will mean a “hollowing” out of his force.

The Navy? The carrier Harry Truman will not be sailing to the Persian Gulf. The Abraham Lincoln will not be overhauled in Newport News. Thousands of jobs will be lost.

Reporter Rowan Scarborough writes that the Air Force has produced “a map of the U.S. that shows state-by-state the millions of dollars lost to local economies,” should the guillotine fall.

Military aid to Israel may be cut, says John Kerry.

But if an evisceration of the national defense is imminent, why did Obama not tell us in 2012? Why were the joint chiefs silent, when they are panicked now? Are the generals, admirals and contractors all crying wolf?

Undeniably, spending cuts by sequester slicer, chopping all equally, is mindless. And with the national security, it manifests a failure of both parties to come to terms with the world we are now in.

The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is gone. Mao’s China is gone, though a mightier China has emerged, as America’s share of the global economy is shrinking. Moreover, as ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen contends, our greatest strategic threat is not Kim Jong Un or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the soaring national debt.

And if, as Republicans insist, we have a debt crisis because we are “spending too much,” spending will have to be cut—discretionary spending, entitlements and defense. And the only question about the defense cuts is not whether they are coming, but where.

What is needed is what America, since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, has stubbornly resisted doing: a strategic review of all U.S. commitments abroad to determine which remain vital to the national security. Before we decide what our defense forces should be, let us determine what is in the U.S. vital interest to defend at risk of war.

Start with NATO. In 1961, President Eisenhower urged JFK to bring home the U.S. forces and let the Europeans raise the armies to defend themselves, lest they become military dependencies.

Yet, more than 20 years after the Wall fell, the Red Army went home, East Europe broke free and the Soviet Union fell apart, we have scores of thousands of troops in Europe.

Why? The European Union’s economy is 10 times that of Russia. Europe’s population is twice Russia’s.

Why are we still there?

Though we have given NATO war guarantees to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, our McCainiacs want them handed out to the Ukraine and Georgia. Yet no president in his right mind is going to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia over some Caucasus dustup or Baltic brawl.

If Richard Nixon could achieve a modus vivendi with Chairman Mao, have we no statesman who can patch it up with Vladimir Putin? A first step might be to pull all U.S. missiles out of Eastern Europe and put our democracy-meddlers on the next plane out of Moscow.

Even as Ike was telling JFK to bring the troops home from Europe, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was urging JFK not to put his foot soldiers in Asia—advice not taken there, either.

On retirement, Robert Gates said any future defense secretary who advises a president to fight another land war in Asia ought to have his head examined. So why do we have 28,000 U.S. troops in Korea and 50,000 in Japan?

In his Guam Doctrine, Nixon declared that in any future Asian war, we should provide the weapons to our Asian allies and they should do the fighting. Does that not still make sense today? Before we can decide the size and shape of our defense budget, we need a consensus on what we must defend.

And if Republicans wish to remain a viable party, they cannot delegate these decisions to the “We-are-all-Georgians-now!” crowd that plunged us into Iraq and is bawling for intervention in Syria and war on Iran.

The GOP desperately needs a credible, countervailing voice to the uber-hawks whose bellicosity all but killed the party in the Bush era.

Obama is president because of them. And his most popular act, according to voter surveys from 2012? Ending the war in Iraq.

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26 Responses to Come Home, America—and Republicans

Given what I have heard recently from the direction of Senator Rand Paul (R- KY), he will not be the GOP’s “credible, countervailing voice to the uber-hawks whose bellicosity all but killed the party in the Bush era.”

But who else is there?

Fox news, talk radio, and pundits galore — all seemingly strain every nerve in their body to prevent the GOP from pivoting to a less bellicose posture.

Our elites’ favorite and personally profitable penchant is to continuously venture abroad in search of dragons for us to slay for them, new ones if possible, old ones if they must. Despite claims of blame attributed to the allies who won’t pull their own defense weight, the truth is that our taxpayer debt funds their ability to mandate U.S. government control of those allies.

If our elites’ interests actually coincided any longer with those of the 300 million who by any democratic definition must be considered the real America, there might be some marginal benefit to the majority for their policies. But no matter how you draw the Venn diagrams now, there’s no overlap.

Our politicians, elected by the citizens, really ought to be responsible to them, not the financial elites.

But it’s really hard to make people give up what they’ve purchased, especially after having enjoyed the perks of ownership.

This is as usual spot on, there is no peer for Mr. Buchanan when it comes to foreign policy. However it does stop one short, in that if Israel is such a vibrant, free, wonderful capitalist society, and has a triad of 200 nuclear weapons, it does not need a penny from the US. The money should be spent on domestic infrastructure, to encourage manufacturing, etc.

What is omitted is Republican corruption and Ike’s warning. Whenever these cuts are mentioned they are posited as job destroyers. This is the usual hypocrisy, where it is evil Kenyan socialism to subsidize solar power, but just fine to waste billions on weapons that will never be used in any realistic defense scenario.

The fatal flaw is of course where three interpretations of the Bible come together… on the one hand as a literal land deed for Israel, on the second hand as a recipe for our future featuring a nuclear apocalypse and Rapture, and as a literal, on the third hand, prescription for social and sexual mores, based on revelations from several thousand years ago, in an age where women were oppressed, slavery approved, and the like.

The writers at TAC seem to have given up on the first two interpretations but still cling to the third for the most part. The Republican Party seems to embrace all three. There is, however, no way the Republican Party as currently configured will yield on the first two matters, so all the writers here are grasping at air.

We could have a conservative foreign policy, but not with the Republicans in charge. Why can the writers here not see that? And when it comes to domestic governance, it is clear that the government should not be in the business of legislating mores based on an ancient tome, nor will it. It is also clear that small government will never be able to regulate big business. Therefore, true conservative governance domestically would HAVE to promote right-sized governance, either by limiting the size of business or by matching government to business of unlimited size but doing it well; reducing corporate influence on politics, cleaning up the tax code. Why can the writers here not see that?

I remember the across-the-board Budget Freeze during the Reagan Administration in 1984-5. We were prepared to send everyone home except “essential personnel”. Never materialized. Methinks today’s apocalyptic predictions of the sequester are exaggerated.

The question really comes down to what we want to spend our dollars on. Waste in defense spending, especially that which allows other countries to spend more on their people rather than their own defense, is essentially another form of US welfare. Jobs may be lost when defense cuts are made but with better allocation of that capital, spent here in the US, could create other jobs to take their place. We have examples of poor asset allocation running rampant through our system providing perverse incentives and Defense is only one, but a huge one. Other examples are the costs of health care, especially in the provider sector, where billing has no link to the reality of the costs of service provided. In a market that is essentially captured, almost like utilities, why do we not regulate the industry as if they are utilities? I realize regulation is a dirty word, but the utility example shows it can be effective in curbing costs while still providing good service. Government exists and it will continue to exist so there will be no “strangling it in a bathtub.” That doesn’t mean it can’t be leaner and more efficient. Republicans simply need to acknowledge that waste and fraud exist in places other than the dreaded entitlements.

Today’s 54% Americans (who apparently voted for the current president in November last year) do not believe in what Mr. Buchanan wrote above. They want more government spending on social welfare and overseas military adventure to stimulate the U.S. and world economy.

Why isn’t Mr. Buchanan taking some fresh ideas from Vice President Dick B. Cheney that Federal deficits do not matter in the long run.

After all, late President Ronald Wilson Reagan proved that in his 8 years in the Oval Office!!!

If you beleive in Keynesian fiscal methods to revive depressed economies, this is the perfect time for American troops to come home and for Europe to start massive spending on a new, European military. Funding and operating a unified military would also unify the peoples of Europe, who are economically bound, but still culturally and politically divided.

I was somewhat with you, until you began that slide into post modern analysis of social more’s and male female relationships . . .

Slavery, is a concept practiced among societies for several reasons and rarely are they ever the same from culture to culture. And most slavery and the most brutal forms of it existed under societies which did not have a judeo-christian perspective. I have no clue where some of you get your history.

Women do not have a history of oppression any more than men have. You view as expressed is post modern feminist selective history . . .

The subjugation you speak revolved around an important concept still in service today. That a women was to be protected. The concept of a woman;s weakness has been so distorted to fit the feminist/liberal dialogue.

A woman’s weakness pertained to her value as the bearer of life. Sheikding her was paramount. Needed for the survival of the species. Generally weaker in physical stregnth as to her physical build. But the one sided narrative about subjugation is self serving to the cause. Traditional marriage also included long hours of labor for most couples. The myth crreated by post modernists of past historical is just devoid of reality for most families. Life is and has always been a tough for most families. That man she supposedly enslaved herself to, was himself slaving away under brutal conditions to provide for his family. That man left his wife to care for home and hearth as he bled in the fields of battle. You do realize that the male female dynamic in marriages was forged across thousands of years of actual living. Something as simple as the traditional man walking behind a man reflects not a woman’s subservience to men but her value — that any potential oncoming threat would be met first by men.

Most men are not beating up their wives, they are not treating their wives as chattle, but partners, each engaged in differeing roles and the roles which required the greatest risk were male endeavours.

Women have been objects for sure and history makes it clear that have been the objects for which men have worked themselves to death to honor.

I certainly understand how you might interpret the election as a mandate, but I think the general consesus about the past election was the electorate wasn’t all that excited about your candidate, they just thought his position was friendlier in a sense towards people.

Notice, you don’t here a public outcry about the current stagnation of Congressional and WH relations. I don’t think their fears of the past were about budgets as much as it was about — economic conditions that were years in the making, say close to twenty years of econimic behavior that generally went unchecked.

It’s one thing to get a mandate on policy. It is quite another to win an election based soley on fear. And that is what the electorate responded to fear. An emotion liberals have relied on to advance policy and sadly conservatives did a fine job of tilling that soil.

But about agendas, this admin is making them up as they go along. They have neither plan not forsight. How is it that a HCI was implemented that does not reduce the size of healthcare — that was the point afterall. It does not decrease healthcare costs. It was so obviously a violation of the Constitution, Justice Robert’s had to do circus gymnastics to justify it, to include exceding his mandate and rewriting it.

The bailouts are a fiasco. No mechanism s are in place to prevent it. The admin actually hired some of the most egregious offenders — so much for change.

Instead of actually changing the previous admin foreign policies, the admin has actually advanced them and advanced them against no threat. At least there was some provocation for the previous admin.

After decrying and denunciation, the current wh occupant’s most noteable acheivement, requiring no assistance from anyone — was his solution to the ever present tense relations between black men and the police — a beer at the WH. That is the depth of his leadership skill. That remains the depth of his understanding os the US character and place in the world. He has no intention of having a brew with Putin. He is lost as to any effective approach to the ME, scared of Israel, hamstrung over Iran, outfoxed in Egypt, Syria and Lybia.

Has no economic policy or agenda beyond keeping his fingers crossed . . . has no idea where the bail out money went and who benefitted, well, wait a minute, he knows exactly whpo benefitted, they are still advising him.

World War II was the pivotal event in the transformation of our nation from a republic to an empire. We were told in 1941 that the reason for WWII was an isolationist US and the remedy henceforth would be preparedness (ie, militarism) and an interventionist foreign policy (ie, imperialism). That wisdom was based on the Munich paradigm (if only we had fought Hitler in 1938, we wouldn’t have had to fight him in 1941, etc) and is still believed by a majority of the US population 72 years, half a million dead Americans, and trillions of dollars later.

How much better it might have been had we listened to James Madison instead of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman: “War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

“What is needed is what America, since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, has stubbornly resisted doing: a strategic review of all U.S. commitments abroad to determine which remain vital to the national security. ”

That is the whole thing in a nutshell. I do believe that quite a few of our committments are no longer vital to our national security.

It all depends on whose vital interests are considered matters of national security. In an age where Wall Street Rules, where these “Masters of the Universe” say, “L’etat, c’est moi” anything they consider in their economic interest anywhere in the world is vital to “American” national interests, even if it is to the detriment of 300 million of their countrymen. They manufacture foreign policy as well as the public opinion to support it, one of the few manufacturing industries still in a growth phase in America.

As far as blaming this upon the Bible, that’s just the result of the wealthy, beginning in the early 20th century, subverting churches’ teachings through large donations to churches and ministries. It should therefore be no surprise then when religious teaching is thereby twisted to support and propagandize secular power aims.

The moral sense to resist all of the above won’t be found in the amorphous mishmash of disgruntled secular opinions that are a product of such a misanthropic society. There is no sustainable morality as circumstances and expediencies demand pragmatic changes to transitory moral codes based on the moment. Under such a scenario, anything at all can and will be justified that one would have been thought anathema to either liberal or conservative sensibilities.

The true moral values that can resist the changing temptations and corruptions of any particular time
are not ephemeral, but have had their enduring truths tested by thousands of years of experience – they aren’t just brand-new fancies made up by those born yesterday – and they did not promote oppression or slavery, either, even though they have something to say about sexual and personal mores.

It really isn’t any coincidence that at a time when we lack any meaningful restraint on the elites’ imperial aggression, vast financial misappropriation by corporate and government leaders, that there is little appetite for needed moral restraint at the personal level, either. Hence, we trash the inconvenience to our self-indulgent and selfish urges of what history has taught important, and instead just begin to make it up in a self-serving way as we go along.

I never miss reading Buchanan’s twice weekly columns. In this one, Pat’s frustration with the GOP is quite palpable. I love his use of the term ‘McCainiacs’ to describe those in the GOP who seem anxious to get us involved in every imaginable conflict. (Is there anyone who still thinks that a person with McCain’s explosive temperment should have been elected president?) What frustration Pat must feel for those in his party who are leading it to possible extinction. Makes me wonder how Pat could bring himself, albeit at the last minute, to endorse Romney for president, who seemed anxious to carry out the McCain/Graham obsessions.

I keep going back to “Suicide of a Superpower.” All signs are that the US, as constituted today, is unsustainable and imploding. These GOP hacks leading the party to destruction are not living in reality. Of course, neither are Obama and the woefully statist dems, who can’t even ditch Pelosi as their House leader. And this country doesn’t need a viable third party?

There is no doubt that military spending itself is a gigantic economic stimulus package. We all would prefer that our private industry stimulate the economy with research, investment and employment. Private industry has failed the working class in favor of greater profit margins in the available alternative of asian labor and growing markets with minimal worker and environmental protections. All fostered under the not so free trade of MIC protected energy resources financed by borrowing against all future US taxpayers.
We should have daily feeds from our mars bases and exploratory spaceships as we develop and utilize the newest technology from those endeavors. Instead we are remotely blowing up sheet wearing religious zealots now heavily armed by the merchants of death. We must confront that whole money trail of oil and weapons. The dried and shriveled parts of the republican synapse needs to be replaced with realigned and new paths to the future. Evolve or die. Go green, or open pit coal mine and acid wash petroleum through our groundwater for export to china in support of their slave labor making textiles and plastic brick- a- brack for the sophisticated american consumer. Yeah buddy, we needs lottsa AR’s to protect that there property.
Specifically, how might we take the enormous resources invested in defense and projection of power, into expanding our possibilities towards the future rather than defending the vested interests of the past?

Why don’t we want to cut defense? The answer is obvious: we still believe we can micromanage the globe. We can plant liberal democracy in Afghanistan. We can stop civil war in Syria. We can impose our will on other countries around the world. We know best.

And there’s a lot of money to be made supplying everything needed to run this empire. Never forget to ask, “cui bono?”

Historically, no empire has ever chosen to retreat from its status as hegemon. Retreat has always been forced and it’s never been pretty. America’s founding republican values offer a model of prudence and restraint that might serve us well. On the other hand, Rome paid lip service to its republican values long into the Principate.

Adopting a foreign and defense policy that actually meant defending the USA from attack rather than managing international affairs around the world would be hard. We’d have to accept that there will be wars fought that are none of our business. We’d need to accept that countries will have leaders who won’t do our bidding. We’d have to accept that governments won’t always treat their citizens the way we’d like. In short, we’d have to give up control.

But I think the republic would be far more secure for it. Let America be a beacon, not a ruler. That’s also how best we can serve the world over the long run.

C’mon, Senator! Everyone knows that if unemployed Americans were starving to death on the National Mall, Israel would still get its annual welfare check.

Speaking of the sequester, the trillion bucks we’ve blown on Tel Aviv and Israel-related disasters over the past 20 years would come in pretty handy about now, wouldn’t it? Too bad we’ll have to cut defense of the American homeland instead.

Pat, now that you are in your Golden Years, don’t leave your followers, such as myself, to keep hoping year after fruitless year that the Republicans will reform. I don’t want to remember you that way. If Moses had told the Israelites to keep hoping things would improve, and not led them out of Egypt, how would he be remembered today? Perhaps not at all. Don’t waste the stature of your statesmanship longing for them to “come home.” Just like some mothers had to painfully give up that their sons would finally be found alive in the jungles of Vietnam, we too might have to admit that they aren’t “coming home.”

“If Richard Nixon could achieve a modus vivendi with Chairman Mao, have we no statesman who can patch it up with Vladimir Putin? A first step might be to pull all U.S. missiles out of Eastern Europe and put our democracy-meddlers on the next plane out of Moscow.”

Indeed. Our policy toward Russia is a source of shame for our country. We can cozy up to degenerate Arab-Muslim “royals” in the Gulf, going out of our way to respect their savage and anti-Western religion, but we treat a cousin European country like a pariah, simply because Putin does not play by the effeminate rules of the Washington Consensus.

Forty years after the truce that ended American involvement in Vietnam, no one is more welcome in that country than the ex-servicemen (US and Australian, primarily) who fought in that country.

They can visit old battle fields, go to bars and hear the grand daughters (at least chronologically) of the bar girls they remember sing the “Cheap Charlie” song to men in their sixties.

The Vietnamese had and have NO interest in blowing up buildings, buses or any damn thing else in this country. And those of us, who worked closely with the Vietnamese 40 years ago, know that they fought the Chinese for 3000 years to remain independent of THEM.

ALL THAT CRAP that was sold to us 5 decades ago about that country and that war, is being repeated by arrogant, egotistical fools as reasons for more unnecessary wars.

We ought to start to recognize that if a nation of peasants who were highly motivated, well (even if ruthlessly) led, and monomaniacally focused could cause us such grief 40 years ago, we cannot continue to prance around the world as though we are immune to a comeuppance.

The other great failure of leadership that is going to bite us in the rear end, is for the Congress (by omission) to rubber stamp Obama’s personal “hit list”.

If Obama is justified in ordering the “hits” on suspected “threats to this country”, then Richard Nixon would have be justified in ordering a “hit” on Jane Fonda, after she sat at the controls of that anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam 40 years ago.

There is NO WAY that Obama’s “hits” could be constitutional, if Nixon’s theoretical “hit” is not. Failure of the Congress to act is the greatest display of political gutlessness in 40 years.

“Women do not have a history of oppression any more than men have. You view as expressed is post modern feminist selective history . . .”

EliteComm. Alright then, let’s stick an ultrasound wand internally before you get your viagra (which, incidentally, has usually been covered by insurance, while birth control, not so much).

For Pete’s sake, we thought we won the birth control battle & made our gynecological issues & choices between ourselves & our doctors. But now we are back to being called sluts again.

Conservatives: in favor of government small enough to fit into my vagina (its okay, that’s a medical term & I’m a physician, so I can say it).

I am loving TAC, but can’t wait to see if this makes it past the mods…..for as rational as the writers & commenters can be on most issues, I’ve noted that many are still fine with exerting control over women’s bodies.